In 1966, the Partisan Necropolis to the west of the Neretva river was built. The monument, designed by architect Bogdan Bogdanović, is a cemetery-park commemorating 810 Partisans from Mostar. It is designed as a microcosm of the city of Mostar – a city of the dead, mirroring the city of the living. The cemetery has the same cobbled paths, alleys and gates that are so characteristic for Mostar. During the Second World War the city was known as the red city because it had a particularly strong antifascist resistance, of which the members were of Serbian, Croatian and Muslim ethnicity. Traces of this resistance can be found on the gravestones of the Partisan Necropolis, where the different names are distributed proportionally according to the percentage of the population representing each ethnicity at the time the monument was built. The monument was a public park that marked a new shared start after the Second World War.
This year 50 years has passed since the construction of the Partisan Necropolis. No one could have foreseen the horrors that would happen in these 50 years. During the civil war between 1992 and 1995 seventy percent of the city was destroyed. ...
I visited the monument in August 2015 as an annual ritual. Every year I walk through the Old City, crossing the New Old Bridge, via the Korzo (the old promenade), past the many ruins on the ‘Spanish Square’, by the Bruce Lee monument and along the Rondo and the former House of Culture (now House of Croats), to the Partisan Necropolis. Three years ago it was already overgrown, neglected and a shady hangout. Last year I was too scared to go up into the park, the grass was too high and the entrance had been set on fire a few months before. [Arna Mackic, 2015]
Many of the memorial buildings, to which I have devoted my best mental and physical strengths, do not exist any more or are, at least for now, condemned to an invisible deterioration and disappearance. I would feel miserable if I would — even for a moment — allow myself to regret, for instance, the most opulent work of my architectural youth: the Partisan monument in Mostar, today when the real old Mostar has disappeared, along with the even older Mostarian families, whose children rest in this honourable war cemetery. When I once explained my idea for the monument, I told a grateful audience the story of how one day, and forever after, ‘two cities’ will look each other in the eyes: the city of the dead antifascist heroes, mostly young men and women, and the city of the living, for which they gave their lives… [Bogdan Bogdanović in Mostarska Informativna Revija MM, no. 12/13, June 1997]
